Insurance companies are first and foremost, you know, businesses! With that, expenses of their own follow that must be taken care of before they are best able to provide care for anyone else.
This understanding is at the heart of the new American Health Care Act recently passed by the House. As per usual, the left’s misunderstanding of the function of government alongside the entitlement generation’s expectation for handouts that cost more than they can even comprehend has led the media into their latest click-bait hysteria: Trumpcare’s elimination of ACA pre-existing condition requirements.
In an article published by Salon entitled “50 preexisting conditions that can make you lose your insurance if Trump and the GOP get their way”, Steven Rosenfield, under the guise of a misleading, click-pestering title, complains about the AHCA’s attempt to return insurance sense back to insurance companies. This article, among the hundreds of others, reeks “trigger-warning” and is full of ideologically charged misrepresentations. Throughout the article, statistics and estimates are pulled out of thin air, provided by the embedded links to Alternet and other already biased sources.
It continues, listing the 50 chosen ailments, attempting to appeal to the reader’s pathos, followed by statements like, “Here are more illnesses you should magically avoid, lest you run the risk of being monetarily punished for getting sick”.
Here’s the problem with these sarcastic passes at the AHCA; there would be no real need for wand-waving avoidance if consumers decided to purchase their insurance before getting sick. That’s the point of insurance, paying now for risks later. Otherwise, why would anyone pay in until absolutely necessary? Where would the money to pay for your recovery come from if no one was paying for it while healthy?
Insurance companies do good work helping us with unbearable costs at times of our most need; however, they cannot spawn money for newly added sick customers out of the air. Therefore, if a customer comes to them with a pre-diagnosed and expensive health issue, they have to take that into consideration to budget properly in helping ALL of their sick clients.
Generally, insurance companies are businesses, providing a service for customer’s health needs based on the funds they have. Apparently, this has changed. They are now socially claimed organizations, forced to provide the same coverage to a client who has been paying into the system for 30 years without an ailment as to the already pregnant woman who has just decided healthcare is a necessity.
Consider car insurance, if a customer went to buy car insurance with 10 accidents on their record, they would have to pay more than a client who had never even so much as hit a tree. This is unfortunately but simply how the world works.
Even further, there will be no health care at all if the market continues spiraling the way it has. Since 2015, 28% of insurance companies have pulled out of Obamacare, unable to stay afloat in this heavily regulated market. After pulling their company out, the CEO of Aetna, Mark Bertolini, called the ACA a “death spiral” for this very reason. Let alone those snubbed by pre-existing conditions, the entire country will be uninsured if the market is not allowed to return to its former condition.
For the record, all of these pre-existing conditions existed as caveats before the ACA was enacted…this should not be news to anyone; BuzzFeed, Salon, and The New York Times, I’m talking to you.
So, next time you see an article suggesting that you’re going to lose your rights under the trauma of Trumpcare, try to understand that he’s not maliciously attacking the sick or the pregnant; he’s simply allowing insurance companies to charge what they need to charge to keep their clients well.
